Confidence in the Kitchen
For a long time I considered myself to be a damn good cook. “I can make a regular box of Annie’s mac and cheese taste like a gourmet meal.” (Hint: good olive oil and loads of garlic and onions). “My marinara sauce is da bomb!” (Hint: good olive oil and loads of garlic and onions). “I never buy salad dressing, I make my own!” (No onions but do I even have to tell you the rest…..)
Turns out fresh-out-of-college-Luce was a bit cocky and a lot dorky. Why wouldn’t I be? I cooked for myself for all of senior year and watched every Jaime Oliver cooking video on YouTube–I practically knew it all!
Sheesh, thinking back, it’s a bit embarrassing. Nevertheless, in cooking I had found something I enjoyed and did have some chops in the kitchen. Enough that I kept at it, and watched more videos and practiced more and ate thoughtfully, trying to improve my skills.
The more I’ve learned and the more I’ve cooked, the more I realize how little I knew. I just had a couple basic tricks up my sleeve that I used over and over. Turns out this was classic Dunning-Kruger…
The Dunning-Kruger effect is the common mistake that novices fall into whereby they know just enough to believe they are experts. As a beginner learns and masters the basics of any new skill their confidence tends to spike. Ironically, as a novice begins to become more competent they lose confidence and it may take until expertise before confidence levels reach those of the novice again.
For the record, I had to look up the Dunning-Kruger Effect. I may be a dork but I don’t just throw around Cognitive Psychology terms every day.
Right now, I can say with some confidence that I am in that trough of Average. I’ve got decent skills and can whip up a tasty meal, but I know how much more I can learn. That’s one of the main reasons I’m here, writing about cooking: I am here to improve. I’m planning on cooking more and eating more (wait, that’s a bad idea) and writing about it. With a bit of luck I might just get better.
That said, I’ve got a little bit to say about confidence in the kitchen since I think it’s one thing that can go a long way towards making a successful cook. And after I just told you how little I know, if you’re still reading, here’s a big ol’ thumbs up!
I think of confidence in the kitchen as the combination of 3 key things:
Knowing what you are doing.
Knowing what you are going to do next.
Knowing what is going to happen.
Of course, there’s also a bit of knowing how to cope with problems that comes with experience and will certainly lend confidence, but if you have these three points down, you should feel pretty good about whatever you are doing. Let me explain what I mean by each point.
1. Knowing what you are doing.
Let’s say you are following a recipe and it calls for “sweating aromatics in a pan.” If you see that and you understand that it means sauteing usually a combination of onions, carrots, celery and sometimes garlic at a medium heat so they soften but don’t brown, great, you’ve probably done this before! If, on the other hand you start imagining a stuffy fragrance counter at Macy’s then you probably aren’t going into the recipe with confidence.
2. Knowing what you are about to do.
There’s nothing worse than having to check a recipe at a critical moment, only to realize that something’s burned or that you’ve missed a step while you were re-reading the order of operations. Being able to hold the step you’re on and the step you’re about to do in your head simultaneously prevents mistakes and lends confidence throughout the recipe. This is why you always hear Mary Berry on the Great British Baking Show tell the contestants to read the recipe all the way through before starting. I like to read the recipe through and try to speak out loud the steps to make sure I’ve got the gist before diving in.
Just as important as recipe awareness is ingredient and tool prep. Chef’s around the world refer to this as mise en place which means “everything in its place” in French. This means having all your veg chopped and portioned into bowls before you start to cook so you’re not frantically chopping onions while the garlic burns. This means having all ingredients measured out for baking so there aren’t any surprises. Aside from prepping ingredients you also want to be ready with tools and utensils. You don’t want your pasta to get mushy while you’re looking for your colander. Prepping tools and ingredients ahead of time, and having an uncluttered workspace, leads to less stress and better results especially when cooking from a recipe or preparing something new.
Here’s some basic mise en place for banana bread. I’ve got my recipe open, my ingredients measured and my sous chef ready for action.
3. Knowing what is going to happen.
Here, I mean being able to anticipate how ingredients, your actions as a cook and Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat (don’t @ me Samin!) as well as time, will create change and eventually create a dish. Each of these three points I’ve mentioned are inextricably linked to experience but perhaps no more so than knowing what is going to happen. If you have the chefy lingo and have a fair bit of cooking under your belt you can begin to visualize what the various stages of cooking will look like as a meal comes together, or even as you read a recipe. Aside from its mouth watering effect, I think this is why video is the best way to learn how to cook, save being in the kitchen next to a pro. If you watch the stages and then can visualize the color change, the smells you’ll smell, the texture you’re looking for, you’ll be better equipped when cooking live to time things properly and feel confident calling something done, or deciding when to add the next ingredient.
Even if I have my mise done and the recipe steps in my head, I still feel moments of stress or panic when cooking something for the first time. The other day I made chicken tikka masala a recipe I’d never attempted previously and throughout I had my doubts that I was doing it right. Turns out I made some critical errors along the way, but I’ve learned from them and I know what I’ll do differently and what visual cues I’m looking for the next time around to lead me to a better dish.